Unruly plane passengers: Why first class passengers are the real reason for air rage

A passenger on an airliner becomes belligerent, drunk, noncompliant with rules, or has some sort of emotional outburst. At its most innocuous, it's unpleasant. At its worst, flight attendants and passengers have been threatened or injured, and flights have been diverted for emergency landings and arrests.

Katherine DeCelles of the University of Toronto and Michael Norton of Harvard studied more than 1000 air rage incidents over the course of nearly a million flights with one major airline (its identity was kept confidential).

They looked for predictors of bad behaviour. How far seats tilted back, impinging on the space of a fellow passenger, wasn't a predictor. Smaller seats, flight delays and longer flight durations all increased the incidence of air rage. After controlling for these logical factors, the authors also found two other major predictors.

First, if a plane had a first class section, the incidence of air rage more than tripled among economy passengers. Blame that curtain separating Us from Them, that gentle admonition to not dare use their bathroom, the smell of warm cookies wafting back to the hungry in economy.

Second, if economy passengers have to walk through first class to get to their seats, rather than entering mid-plane, it causes an even higher incidence of air rage - about a seven-fold increase, equivalent to enduring more than a 15-hour delay.

The findings make sense. An extensive literature shows that being a socioeconomic have-not is bad for your health. It increases the odds of major depression and the likelihood of anti-social or criminal behaviour. An even bigger predictor of those bad outcomes is the noticeable magnitude of socioeconomic inequality - how much the have-nots' noses are rubbed in their bad fortune as they scurry through life's equivalents of the first class section on an airplane. More than poverty, it's poverty amid plenty that enrages us.

Here's another interesting aspect of the air rage study.

Logic would indicate that air rage in economy ought to consist of someone in a frothing state sprinting up the aisle into first class, leading his fellow oppressed passengers in a rousing rendition of "One Day More" from "Les Mis," and berating the well to do. That kind of thing almost never happens.

Instead, the frothing passenger is a jerk to the poor flight attendant who has no choice but to absorb it, or to the hapless grandmother crammed in to the next seat. It's the same with primates displacing aggression: When the going gets tough the obnoxious tend to pick on someone weaker.